Commercial poultry houses may have concrete floors, but such floors have become prohibitively expensive and therefore, at the present time, most poultry houses have dirt floors. In either case, sawdust is applied to the floor in a layer up to several inches thick. Over a period of time, the chicken manure becomes mixed with the sawdust, saturates it, and ultimately results in the formation of a solidified hard layer of litter on the poultry house floor which must not be left intact or allowed to build up indefinitely.
Certain prior art machines typified by U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,263,257; 3,845,516; and 3,662,420 address the problem of removing poultry litter from the floors of large commercial poultry houses. The prior art machines are concerned only with the removal of litter and, in some instances, do a less than adequate job of acting on the hardened layer of litter to reduce it to a state where it can be effectively removed. As a consequence, considerable amounts of hardened litter remain on the poultry house floor and this is undesirable.
In contrast to the known prior art, the present invention is embodied in a simple machine whose purpose is to act on the hardened layer of litter on the poultry house floor and reduce it to a pulverized state where it can be mixed with additional sawdust for reuse on the floor or easily removed from the poultry house, if the latter is deemed desirable. In accomplishing this objective, the present invention is constructed to first scrape and pry up the hardened layer of litter from the floor as the machine advances along the floor behind a tractor. The slightly elevated layer of litter passes above a system of grid plates attached to the scraping and prying blade and is acted upon by rotating flail hammers which reduce the litter to a pulverized state within a housing of the machine which encloses the flail rotor structure. The pulverized litter discharges back onto the floor at the rear of the traveling machine. The flail rotor is powered by the power take-off shaft of the tractor which carries the machine through a three point hitch.
An objective of the present invention is to provide a machine of the above-described type which is compact and substantially unitary in construction, durable, safe to operate, and which requires little maintenance.
Other features and advantages of the invention will become apparent to those skilled in the art during the course of the following detailed description.